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The Role of .NET Remoting

As mentioned, with the release of the .NET platform, DCOM quickly became a legacy distributed

API. In its place, the .NET base class libraries shipped with the .NET remoting layer, represented by

the System.Runtime.Remoting namespaces. This API allows multiple computers to distribute

objects, provided they are all running the applications under the .NET platform. 

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The .NET remoting APIs provided a number of very useful features. Most important was the

use of XML-based configuration files to declaratively define the underlying plumbing used by the

client and the server software. Using *.config files, it was very simple to radically alter the function-

ality of your distributed system simply by changing the content of the configuration files and

restarting the application. 

As well, given the fact that this API is useable only by .NET applications, you can gain various

performance benefits, as data can be encoded in a compact binary format, and you can make use of

the Common Type System (CTS) when defining parameters and return values. While it is possible to

make use of .NET remoting to build distributed systems that span multiple operating systems (via

Mono, briefly mentioned in Chapter 1 and detailed in Appendix B), interoperability between other

programming architectures (such as J2EE) was still not directly possible.